Adventures aren't only for our students!

Minerva attracts the world's most adventurous students. As it turns out, Minerva also attracts the world's most adventurous professors.
Thanks for helping us on our Questival adventures, Professor Greene!

Bonne Pâques!

I'm writing this from a friend's house in Malibu.

A stage director/singer/broadway extraordinaire just left. He taught me how to sing the cadenza at the end of Think of Me from Phantom of the Opera. Me, a supposed second alto... hitting high F's and having a professional person in the music industry go, "Great!"

That's possibly the most uplifting, exciting, wonderful, great, fun thing I've done all year. It actually made my day. Apparently I can sing pretty well. Apparently I have great tone. Apparently I can sing soprano notes. The world is mine. :)

Awesome photo courtesy Nathalie David, the awesome French lady mentioned below.

Accompanying him were two French ladies (ok, I joke, one French lady and one Belgian - "but it's all the same, right?" we joked). In French, "Happy Easter!" is "Joyeuse Pâques!" but also "Bonne Pâques!" though no one says the latter. Mr. Broadway was trying to learn "Happy Easter!" in different languages, but got really hooked on "Bonne Pâques" — now it's slang for "What's up?"

It's going to happen. Just like wife cakes (à la Zoey, who coined it with Tanna) is going to happen.

That's my night in a nutshell, and it was really, really great. Such a great time. I'm so happy right now, about all of this.

(Shoulder) Standing on Top of the World

Yesterday, I went to a yoga class outside of my dorm. Yesterday, I also sang Rolling in the Deep to a person I'd met only a handful of moments before, but that's another story.

Yesterday, I went to a yoga class outside of my dorm. I had never been able to do a decent shoulder stand before then; this time, I actually didn't lose my balance! It sort of made me feel like I was standing on top of the world – shoulder standing on top of the world, that is.

For the people who don't know, I hack things (no, not in the illegal way). I build things and change them so that they are cooler, more useful, and other positive adjectives. I guess that this is my way of hacking yoga.

Yesterday, I had a whole lot more to write about. But I'm busy a lot. Writing often doesn't happen. I've been waiting for more MHacks snowball fight pictures to come out so that I can include them in my blog, but, for now, I'll just give a quick recap of the crazy hackathon I went to last weekend:

• We had a giant snowball fight (think 100+ people) in the middle of the night. It was my first snowball fight ever, and it was insane. There were Canadians. I was on the smaller team, but we had a shield. I will not say how it turned out.
• My team tried to integrate Google Glass and Myo (an armband that tracks your hand movements based on your muscle contractions) to create a hack that allows operators in control rooms of nuclear power stations to leave the facility during a meltdown, but still control the reactor's temperature to help mitigate (or even prevent) the meltdown. This would make this job a lot safer. It also has other uses––particularly in very hands-on jobs, when there are other things to do, typically done by another person, because the first person's hands are full––but this use was my favorite. This hack didn't work as well as we'd have liked and my teammates ditched me for a lot of the hackathon, which was unfortunate, but, hey... I learned Android in a weekend.
• There was a cup stacking competition. There were also a ton of Apple engineers who ordered so many cookies from Insomnia Cookies that the local Insomnia Cookies place now knows our name. There was also a make-your-own-hot-cocoa station and it was possibly one of the most wonderful things I have ever, ever encountered.

Anyway, that's what my life has looked like lately. Now, to bed.

Si

Si j'étais reine ou magicienne
Princesse, fée, grand capitaine
D'un noble régiment
Si j'avais les pas d'un géant

I'll keep this short and simple:

I went to my high school today for their annual awards ceremony. I couldn't help but feel a sense of surrealism as I was met with its familiarity; it was like being me, and sinking right into me, in a good way. If I were a bunny, I'd have flopped over in comfort (video here, it's adorable).

Afterwards, many people expressed that they thought that I would have won the trophy for most outstanding CSEC student. Perhaps this was my goal last year. But, this year, it has ceased to bother me. I didn't care enough for my exams earlier this year. I cracked a book only at the very last minute, and only to skim the notes I'd taken over the past two years to ensure that I, in fact, had a decent memory map of all these things in my head – that is, if I cracked a book at all, for some subjects. The person who won the aforementioned trophy devoted a lot of her time to studying, and took many extra lessons to improve her test-taking skills. But that's what standardized testing is: a test of test-taking skills.

Currently, I'm building a space-thing. Most of my peers have continued to the land of rote memorization (level two) – sixth form. But I am building a space thing. And that makes me happier.

Given the chance to "prepare" better for my exams, I wouldn't take it. I am happy with the choices I made – they gave me spare time to learn about things I found way more interesting than what we were learning in school, and such happiness afforded by this spare time learning is irreplaceable. I would do things exactly the same way again, without shame.

Currently, I'm building a space-thing. But that's only the beginning of my journey. I am ecstatic that it begins with this, no matter how it ends. I cannot trade this happiness for anything else, because happiness never was and never will be a type of currency.

This is just the beginning. But, someday, I'll have the steps of a giant.

The Road to MHacks V

Yay! I got accepted to MHacks V, one of the top collegiate hackathons in the world. (OK, admittedly, "the world" here consists mostly of North America, just like calling the SF Giants the "World Champs" really means that they only beat out the other US baseball teams. But it's still a massive hackathon with over a thousand people!)

What is a hackathon?

According to Google, "hackathon" is codeword for "collaborative coding party". In reality, thousands of people gather at a venue with their laptops, ideas, Arduinos, caffeinated drinks, and best coding skills to form many groups of 4-5 people and attempt to change the world through technology and programming.

Technology and programming? Change the world? What?
In my last post, I mentioned something I had built at a hackathon, called Lif³ (pronounced "life cube"). Well, let's elaborate.

In nerd-speak, Lif³ is a CubeSat bioreactor which is launched into space with an experiment of the user's choice inside for a time period specified by the user. While in space, Lif³ relays data on the experiment back to the user on Earth in near-real time using cloud-based analytics. This data can include – but is not limited to – temperature, video feed, and frequent pictures of the experiment as it is set up in the cube. Most other data will depend on the specific experiment (e.g. cell count or glucose concentration for cellular cultures).

Translation: Lif³ is a 10x10x10cm cube which can be launched to space in a rocket and grow organisms for scientific purposes. It allows users to conduct experiments in space, without the user actually being in space. All experimental data is measured by the cube and sent back to the user via the Internet.

Tl;dr: This cube fits in your hand and lets you do biology experiments from anywhere.

Lif³ has more applications than just science in space. It can have a huge impact on schools in which larger labs are inaccessible to students, since each student or class can run the experiment in a small, portable environment. The portability of this technology is great, but something the users don't even need to worry about, considering the cube sends all the data to the users in any place anyway.

Want to know more about this weird cube-thing some friends and I made? You can find our website here, but bear in mind that the website isn't completely finished as we're focusing more on building/completing features of the cube.

Lif³ won the wetware category of the Magnitude.io Space Hackathon and was awarded the privilege of a summer 2015 launch to the International Space Station.

More Crazy Inventions: MHacks V
I really want to go to MHacks so I can build more awesome things like Lif³. However, the MHacks organizers were unable to offer me travel reimbursement from San Francisco, CA to Detroit, MI. To this effect, I'm crowdfunding my way to MHacks here. If you have a couple bucks to spare, I'd love it if you could help me get there. (If everyone reading this gave $5, we'd be done in an hour.) Similarly, if you find a cheaper flight – send it my way. Even if you can't spare money, it'd be great if you could pass this campaign around to your friends.

After MHacks, expect an update on what I built. I'd offer periodic updates throughout the weekend, but hackathons are intense, and I will likely have no spare time. I'll try to jot down some progress notes as the weekend progresses, though, so everyone can see what goes into inventing something in 48 hours.

Until then, I'll be brushing up on my Javascript. :)